Reviewing the new drag queen-centered Broadway show Kinky Boots in Monday’s New York Times, critic Ben Brantley chose to dedicate a few paragraphs to the bizarre suggestion that the show should make one think “that maybe all those grumpy guys who populate the Republican debates might be a lot looser if they traded in their navy suits for rainbow-colored ball gowns.”
Debates
By Rich Noyes | December 27, 2015 | 9:47 AM EST
Since last week, NewsBusters has been presenting each category from the Media Research Center’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2015,” our annual awards for the year’s worst journalism. Today, the “Hopeless Haters Award,” for the worst quotes denigrating the conservative GOP presidential candidates. Winning the top slot: MSNBC Morning Joe regular Donny Deutsch, who on March 23 slammed just-declared GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz as “scary,” “slimy” “dumb” “ignorant” and “dangerous.”
By Brad Wilmouth | December 21, 2015 | 3:08 PM EST
Appearing as a guest on CNN's Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield to report on South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham's departure from the GOP presidential race, CNN's Kate Bolduan oddly claimed that the low-polling candidate's debate performances were "really widely, you know, seen as winners," inspiring agreement from host Banfield.
By Curtis Houck | December 21, 2015 | 1:06 PM EST
Liberal historian and former Johnson administration staffer Doris Kearns Goodwin was on Sunday’s Meet the Press panel and to the shock of no one, sang the praises of Hillary Clinton by proclaiming how she projected an “amazing...internal confidence” in the debate and has become “a better candidate now than she was six months ago” and from 2008.
By Curtis Houck | December 19, 2015 | 11:47 PM EST
After airing an hour of coverage following the last Saturday night Democratic presidential debate on November 14, MSNBC skipped out on airing any post-debate analysis after Saturday’s third Democratic debate on ABC and instead played yet another episode of its weekend jail series Lockup.
By Curtis Houck | December 19, 2015 | 10:54 PM EST
In the final set of questions of Saturday’s Democratic presidential debate prior to the closing statements, ABC’s co-moderator Martha Raddatz served up a massive softball to frontrunner Hillary Clinton concerning how former President Bill Clinton would function as a member of the First Family if Hillary is elected president.
By Curtis Houck | December 19, 2015 | 10:04 PM EST
In one of the more awkward and bizarre happenings you’ll see in a debate, Saturday’s Democratic presidential debate on ABC restarted without frontrunner Hillary Clinton following a commercial break and continued for over a minute until she returned to the stage.
By Curtis Houck | December 19, 2015 | 9:00 PM EST
Showing that they’ve learned next to nothing from the George Stephanopoulos/Clinton Foundation scandal, ABC allowed its chief anchor in Stephanopoulos to anchor its pre-game coverage of Saturday’s Democratic presidential debate. Not surprisingly, the former Clinton White House official teamed with DNC Vice Chairwoman Donna Brazile to gush over how Hillary Clinton has “found her footing during the fall” and has been “battle tested” following e-mail server and Clinton Foundation scandals that rocked her candidacy earlier in the year.
By Tom Johnson | December 19, 2015 | 11:49 AM EST
Debbie Wasserman Schultz may not want you to know about it, but there’s a Democratic presidential debate on Saturday evening, and Beutler believes that the candidates therein “would be doing the country a service by placing the right wing appeal to paranoia in its proper context—and then rejecting it forcefully.”
In a Friday piece, Beutler described this week’s Republican presidential debate as “an elaborate group sermon on the importance of being afraid”; opined that the GOP candidates “have made almost no attempt to argue” that their proposals “will reduce the terrorism risk, which is so small to begin with”; and asserted that Republicans’ “position on Jihadi terrorism (that no risk is too small to ignore) is practically the opposite of their position on mass shootings in general (that no risk is worth mitigating at all).”
By Kyle Drennen | December 18, 2015 | 11:11 AM EST
In a focus group with American Muslims on CBS This Morning, participants told political strategist Frank Luntz that Republicans discussing terrorism was so offensive that their children could not be exposed to GOP debates. One woman warned: “I actually did a call out to Muslim parents across the country to not watch the Republican debate in front of their children because I knew that, that – subjecting our children to hear the hateful stereotyping and the lumping of Muslims with terrorism in front of our children is actually something that psychologically impacts them.”
By Brad Wilmouth | December 17, 2015 | 9:56 PM EST
Nearing the end of her MSNBC program Andrea Mitchell Reports on Thursday, NBC Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell claimed that "there is a lot of discrimination" against Muslims as she was introducing President Barack Obama's 1:00 p.m. speech.
After suggesting that some of the "rhetoric" at Tuesday's GOP presidential debate was "really a recruitment tool for ISIS," she recounted that Bernie Sanders visited a mosque yesterday and then asserted that "there is a lot of discrimination here," adding that it is "fueling the ISIS rhetoric."
By Brad Wilmouth | December 17, 2015 | 8:54 AM EST
Appearing as a guest on Thursday's New Day on CNN, former Daily Beast Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown lavished praise on GOP presidential candidate Lindsey Graham, as she pined for him to make it onto the main debate stage, and three times gushed that the South Carolina Republican "rocked." She also rejoiced over Senator Graham characterizing Donald Trump as "a poster boy for ISIS," as she asserted that he is "helping to radicalize the non-radical Muslims."